Randy Mills chosen as CIRM president

Biotech executive Randy Mills has been chosen as the next president and CEO of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine.

Mills, who was president and CEO of Osiris Therapeutics in Maryland, will replace outgoing president Alan Trounson. He will be paid $550,000 a year, along with free temporary housing and a $75,000 relocation allowance.

California voters established the institute in 2004 to advance research on stem cells and other types of regenerative medicine. Critics have said the agency has taken too long to move experimental stem cell therapies to the clinical-trial stage. Supporters said the institute has had to be especially careful about the safety of any new technology in this field before testing it in people.

But large numbers of such therapies are now being tried on humans.

The institute's leaders said a key factor in choosing Mills is that he led Osiris Therapeutics when it brought to market the stem cell drug Prochymal, which is used for acute graft-versus-host disease in children, a potentially fatal complication of bone marrow transplantation.

The ability to take stock of what the institute is doing, right and wrong, was important in selecting the new chief executive, said Jonathan Thomas, the institute's chairman. Thomas introduced Mills to the institute's governing Independent Citizens Oversight Committee at its meeting Wednesday in Burlingame.

Mills has experience with the institute from serving for five years on its grants working group, Thomas said.

"Randy has raised some $160 million in the capital market for Osiris. He's very familiar with the investor space," Thomas said.

Thomas said the oversight committee was interested in getting projects into clinical trials as quickly as can be done safely. Research discoveries that result from the institute's funding are brought to market by biotech and drug companies, with the institute getting a cut of the proceeds.

The institute oversees the spending of $3 billion in state bond money. It's projected to run out of those funds by 2017, and the institute will soon have to decide if it will seek more money from voters. Robert Klein, the agency's first chairman, recently unveiled a proposal for a $5 billion bond.

Stem cell researcher Paul Knoepfler said on Twitter that the decision to hire Mills marks "a new era for CIRM: primary focus will be on translation to clinic & grant $ will go accordingly."

But Alexey Bersenev, one of Knoepfler's colleagues, said on Twitter that Mills was a bad choice because he "misled the public with false marketing claims."

Biotech reporter Adam Feuerstein dinged Mills in May 2013 for claiming that Prochymal was the most widely used stem cell drug in the world, when it actually had no sales.

"Mills has a different definition of 'widely used' than most investors," Feuerstein wrote.

In October, Osiris Therapeutics sold Prochymal and the rest of its stem cell business to Australia-based Mesoblast for up to $100 million -- $50 million in cash and stock and up to $50 million in milestone payments.

Mills left Osiris in December. The company said he departed for personal reasons.